Now, to most people, getting a bloody feather in your email inbox would seem to be the digital equivalent of having a bloody horse’s head left in your bed. But in El Rellok’s world it is a rational and reasonable way to express “outrage” at feminist evil, and anyone who might possibly think otherwise is by definition unreasonable.

Let’s let him explain, because I certainly can’t explain how sending pictures of bloody feathers to someone you hate could be construed as anything but threatening:

The idea that men are violent, rather then the primary victims of violence, is being used to discredit men’s issues.

Well, actually, what’s being used to discredit the so-called Men’s Rights Movement is the simple fact that its members don’t seem to know how to engage in any kind of “activism” besides harassing individual women.

It is glaringly obvious that we need a method of clearly expressing unbounded outrage that cannot be construed as a threat by any reasonable person.

I don’t know that expressing “unbounded outrage” is really the most important goal for any activist movement, but the part about saying things that aren’t threatening sounds good to me.

Gentlemen (and ladies) i propose The Red Feather Campaign.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, why a feather?

None here should be unfamiliar with the “white feather girls”.[1] , one of the most craven and deplorable pro war campaigns in human history.

In case you aren’t completely up-to-date with all Men;s Rights hobbyhorses, he’s referring to the Order of the White Feather. Founded in Britain at the start of World War I, this was a group of women that hoped to shame men into enlisting by presenting them with white feathers, a symbol of cowardice.

Though the White Feather campaign happened literally a hundred years ago, at a time when the general public in Britain and elsewhere was rabidly pro-war, and thought it hardly won universal support from the suffragettes of the day, MRAs like El Rellok have turned it into a symbol of the intrinsic evil that lurks in the hearts of feminists today.

The white feather campaign was about mens obligation to sacrifice to women, a socially imposed gender role. Feminists, while declaring their total reprobation for all gendered roles, continue to demand that men sacrifice for women by ceding anything described as privilege, regardless of whether the “Privilege” is earned, a “Privilege” at all, or whether a society without the thing described as a “Privilege” can be understood as just ….

Sorry, I nodded off in the middle of that. He finally gets to the point:

SO, I propose we return to them their feathers covered in the blood of the men mercilessly and ruinously sacrificed to their agenda.

Well, he doesn’t mean this literally – he means PICTURES of feathers that look like they’re covered in blood – but we’ll get to that in a minute.

We make this present with the following message.

“This blood is not your blood. To think it is, is a refraction only of your narcissism. This is the blood of men, sacrificed to females, by females, for generation upon generation. When you speak of sacrifice, before our eyes flash visions of bayonets, within our nostrils the waft of trenches, our ears recall the scream of artillery coming to shred our bodies. That is what sacrifice means to men; agony, suffering, death. This feather is a reminder of your inhumanity towards men, your lack of compassion and understanding, and your hypocrisy in declaring gender roles obsolete while commanding men to fulfill the most destructive of all gender roles, the gender who gets sacrificed.”

I dunno about you, but this is creepy as fuck. And more than a little threatening.

Why this tactic? First, the consistent theme seen presented by SJW/feminists is that men are “Violent oppressors who refuse to compromise.” This meme makes clear that it is not us being oppressive, and that the compromise being asked is not just.

Yeah, sending women pictures of bloody feathers accompanied by an over-the-top mini-manifesto charging them with narcissism and cruelty and blaming them for all the death and misery of war (and who knows what else) is definitely going to convince the world that you’re not violent creeps.

By turning the oppression meme around upon the feminists, it creates equal footing in the debate space.

Yes, that’s right, he thinks the way to win the debate is to quite literally argue “nuh-uh, you are!”

Second, it supplants the current “MRA send death threats” meme. MRA’s do not send death threats, MRA’s send pictures of blood covered feathers.

I’m sorry, what?

MRA’s do not send death threats, MRA’s send pictures of blood covered feathers.

That’s what I thought you said. You people really don’t understand how PR works, do you?

If your message does not include said feather, that was not an MRA, as anyone who understands the MRA position would understand the symbolism and necessity of the red feather campaign.

Yes, that’s right, a woman getting El Rellok’s unhinged message along with a picture of a feather drenched in blood is going to say, ah, yes, this isn’t a threat. This is a Men’s Rights meme, and a perfectly rational conversation-starter on the important topic of why women deserve blame for all the wars in the world because a small number of women in Britain in World War I handed out feathers to men who weren’t enlisted.

Third, it allows us to fracture the feminist movement and more clearly identify those feminists who actually want equality and are just being blind, from those feminists who are actually misanderist (i use that term hesitantly, but as i have not had time to create a new term to describe my view of this branch of feminism, so it is necessary). If we can separate the equality feminists from the misandarists, then we can actually start working with reasonable people to begin wide scale social reform on gender issues.

Trust me, any woman who sees your message as anything but the unhinged rantings of a possibly dangerous crackpot is not any kind of feminist.

Depending upon the response I get here, the above shall be sent to AVFM with a proposal for a “Feather Drive” asking submissions of drawings of bloody feathers we can then use.

This, El Rellok’s concluding sentence, is also the first sentence of his that makes any kind of sense. This sounds right up A Voice for Men’s alley.

In a followup comment, directed at MRAs who weren’t completely convinced that sending pics of bloody feathers is the best way forward for the troubled Men’s Rights Movement, he added:

OK, There are multiple people Doxxing and sending threats to feminists (and others). We need a way to signify that this IS NOT US. We need a way to signify this IS NOT US while still sending a reply of some form. Sending death threats is not useful, and no, sending a picture of a feather with a message clearly stating it is about mens sacrafice is a threat only to people who would percieve any responce at all to be a threat. So unless you are saying we just need to grovel before our new feminist over lords, tell me what the hell else we do. DO you understand the concept that feminism is not simply going to go away if you ignore them? We need a symbol representing male disposability, to counter arguements that we are privilege defending mysoginists. And it needs to be a historically poinant one, or its not going to stick.

Comments

If we were following him around his local internet haunts to call him names, yeah, that would be harassment. But we’re just laughing at his stupid fucking ideas from the comfort of our own internet home. That’s positively civil.

Feminists – Men are responsible for most of the world’s violence, particularly rape. They should stop that.

MRAs – Women are oppressing men by cruelly hoarding their vaginas and not allowing themselves to be distributed via a system that’s decided fairly (ie, by men), and also by making fun of the CGI boobies in their vidya games. That’s much worse than rape!

Kittehserf: It’s fall, so Farmer Mikey who lives Directly on the Beach and was in interior Carolina visiting his Girlfriend’s Condo is too busy harvesting his Fields of Wheat to be able to tell us all about his Being Older than My Dad and having kids Younger than Me Propositioning Him….

…while fluctuating madly between typing with a forced southern twang and normal text

Mansplosion – when he does the above and it builds to a crescendo of entitled fury, and then subsides cause having ranted makes him feel better, like opening the valve on a pressure cooker. Also known as rage-wanking.

Unlike you lot, we don’t feel the need to cast one half of the population as the perpetrator.

Perfect timing. Just the other day, I was pondering on what I believe is one of the possible MRA definitions of feminist (noun): “an uppity woman who may look, dress, and behave herself in a variety of ways, but is not afraid to speak up and express disagreement with me, and otherwise act unwomanly, i.e. having her own opinions and agendas outside of the desire to please my boner”. In other words, they don’t understand feminism, but in their burning fury to blame feminism for women daring to exist as something else besides background decoration and living sex toys serving men, they conveniently out themselves as misogynists.

So, when MRAs say they don’t hate all women, they actually mean that they don’t hate women as ethereal fantasy beings that exist as extensions of their imagination. Except, you know, when they fantasize about raping and abusing said fantasy women.

In order to not sound like the gigantic woman-hating assholes they would if they weren’t too cowardly to admit to being misogynistic asswipes (meaning that deep down, they understand that misogyny is a bad thing and that their views are indefensible), anti-feminists try to portray feminism as this huge bogeyman out to destroy all that is pure and decent in this world. They try to wriggle out of being considered terrible people by all decent people around them by portraying the people opposing their disgusting opinions and tendencies as cartoon villains out to destroy all men for no good reason. “We may be bad, but these people are worse!”

Since MRAs have never actually bothered to study feminist theory, they believe any woman who has the guts to not bow down before male superiority must be a feminist, and therefore bad because made-up reasons. They ignore the facts that not all women with strong opinions and a desire to voice them are feminists (Janet Bloomfield, for instance), and that if you truly believe in gender equality, feminism is actually a pretty good thing to have.

But, you know, whatevs. It’s not like “you lot” would bother to have compassion towards anyone else or to try to understand any point of view besides your petty fantasies of dominance.

Hmm. Badly worded. The last sentence of the first paragraph should start as “They don’t understand what a feminist is“. Women not being subservient to men is definitely feminism’s goal, but not all women who reject society’s narrow idea of “what makes a good woman” and live as they see fit call themselves feminists.

So yeah. Anti-feminists claim they don’t hate women, only feminism, but they sure do hate the ultimate goal of feminism: gender equality and women’s right to exist as individual human beings with full social and legal rights. Which makes them *drumroll* misogynists.

To what anarchonist said, I can only add…I’m pretty sure most feminists are on board with liberating men from gender role enforcement.
The male role isn’t necessarily physically or mentally healthy for men. Guys ought to be free to pick and choose what behaviors work for them without being shamed or ridiculed.

“The male role isn’t necessarily physically or mentally healthy for men. Guys ought to be free to pick and choose what behaviors work for them without being shamed or ridiculed.”

May I suggest a slight revision: The male role is necessarily physically and mentally unhealthy for men. Guys ought to be free to pick and choose what behaviors work for them without being shamed or ridiculed.

The problem with this whole thing is the ignoring of the divide between the men who made the decisions that feminism opposes and the men who quietly suffered along with the women under the same ruling class / working class system. If you were a ruling class man or woman in the last 100 years you probably didn’t have too many problems. If you were a working class man or woman you probably had more than your fair share of problems, including either having your husband blown up in war or being blown up in war, while the ruling class quietly got richer on the whole game. The system was set up to keep the men being as productive as possible making wealth for their masters and the women as productive as possible making babies to keep the economy growing. This battle of the sexes just keeps the masses divided and conquered.

He knows the White Feather Campaign was started by a man, right? And the reason it was mostly women handing them out is because all the men were meant to be SIGNING UP. It would have been a bit hypocritical for perfectly fit men to stick around in England, telling other men to go to France.

Roy: Are you denying that sexism and misogyny exist? ‘Cause we already know that poor men are disadvantaged compared to rich and powerful men. That doesn’t change the fact that blaming women and feminists for the deaths of men in war is both misogynistic and factually incorrect.

Sorry, Roy, but men didn’t just “quietly suffer along”. The patriarchal system you describe gave even poor men some power they could cling to when things got rough – the power they had over “their” women and children. This terrible model was carried over from generation to generation. It has taken feminists and other social movements a heck of a lot of time and effort to get us to the point where we are now, and you think it’s all been a natural progression? Or are you saying that poor women have always had as many rights compared to poor men as they do now? Things are not equal now, but they used to be worse.

It’s really obnoxious to claim that women didn’t work just as hard, or even harder than men throughout history. That’s the ugliness of power and privilege. A man may spend his day working his ass off, but thanks to social expectations backed up by patriarchal laws, they could expect their wife to do just as much hard work and take care of the home and children as well, since that’s her expected social role. That’s how power over another person works. That’s the regressive attitude that the MRAs want to maintain; they want to feel secure in the knowledge that no matter how badly they perform in society, they are above women because of Mighty Peen(TM). Simply being poor does not make a man more aware of the true causes of inequality, or right-wing extremist groups (who are usually racist, misogynistic, homophobic etc. – see the pattern?) wouldn’t get so much support during times of financial depression.

Power corrupts not only the people higher up in the hierarchy, but people in the lower social ranks as well. Giving men power over women has guaranteed that they do not seek to correct the power imbalance and strive to make everyone more equal. Same with racism. Same with all forms of marginalization. After all, if poor white cishet men have social power over so many groups, why risk it all by attacking the systematic oppression that benefits wealthy white cishet men most, but still gives some amount of power to them? “Divide and conquer” is the language of hierarchy and oppression. As long as social inequalities exist and privileged groups are allowed keep their privilege, we cannot reach a political or financial utopia. It cannot happen.

Feminism is not about a battle of the sexes. That’s a ridiculous claim, and shows you have no understanding of feminism. It’s about changing our perceptions of the roles men and women have in society, and bringing about true equality not just legally, but socially as well.

So don’t start with the “let’s forget about dealing with social issues and just attack the classist system together”. I may be the most anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist people I know, but even I realize that toppling a financial system built on an existing system of tradition, privilege and hierarchy will just result in the establishment of a new system built on tradition, privilege and hierarchy.

To make the revolution stick, we need to strike at the heart of social inequalities that allow financial and political inequalities to continue throughout government changes. We need more than a change of political flavor. We need a change in attitudes, perceptions, and awareness. We need true social change. We need feminism.

Roy, you’re ignoring the existence of the wage gap, employment discrimination (which was even worse just a few decades ago), women’s unpaid domestic labor, and the way women are expected to choose parenting over their career (or at least do irreparable damage to their career advancement by taking parenting leave).

Amazingly, oppressions can overlap or even mitigate each other (as you point out, wealth tends to compensate for a lot of other things). Look, when you’re dealing with oppression on multiple axes (such as class and gender), there’s no clear-cut ranking of privilege (nor is it terrible useful to make it into a contest). In specific situations, one (wealthy women or poor men) may have a privilege the other lacks, but looking at the culture as a whole it’s impossible to say definitively whether poor men are more oppressed than wealthy women or vice versa. All we can say with certainly is that wealthy men are privileged over all of them, and that poor women do not have access to either class or gender privilege.

So if I point out that feminists have been working for years to get combat roles in the military opened up to women, and that the opening up of combat roles in the US military to women was seen as a victory for gender equality, will the MRA’s heads explode?

Women have been barred from the draft, and from the military, by hundreds of years of tradition in a male-dominated culture that is much more comfortable with “damsels in distress” than it is with women knowing how to fight and defend themselves without needing men to protect them. If the MRAs were actually fine with women taking care of themselves, then all they would have to do is sit back and wait a decade for the combat and draft issues to equalize.

Speaking of which, women didn’t choose to send men off to war in WWI, as no women held leadership roles in any of the armed forces back then. The white feather diatribe is just MRAs shooting the messengers of some other dudes who actually ran the draft. Punishing all feminists for the actions of a few women from a century-old hawkish PR stunt, that itself was opposed by suffragists, is grasping for straws…er…feathers.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.